CHAPTER 23 A MONSTER AMONG MONSTERS
A MONSTER AMONG MONSTERS
The man pulls back the hood from his head and I cannot fathom what I am seeing.
He is a grotesque approximation of a human being.
His crumbling flesh is so badly decayed around his watery right eye that the yellowed bone of the socket is plainly visible.
The scattering of hair on his head is black and greasy.
His teeth are visible even though his mouth is at rest. It is as if the skin has been pulled back too tightly.
That skin—it’s not a smooth canvas but a patchwork of pieces held over the bone by ragged stitches.
“Is it all clear to you now?” he asks.
In his horrible face I see something from a nightmare and then, with a sudden and dizzying terror, I realize he is familiar to me. I feel as if I know him, as if I’ve seen him. I grasp at the threads of the memory, hauling them up from somewhere deep in my mind.
“The window,” I manage to stammer. “And in the road the night of the accident . . . you were there.”
The man—or whatever he is—smiles. “The school, the cemetery, a hundred other places you’ve been. Always with you. As I was with your father, and his father before him.”
I’d seen the man at my window when I was little. The same man who had stood in front of our car on that rainy night of the accident. The man I’d convinced myself was partially a figment of my imagination is real, and now he is standing in front of me.
“I have kept a watchful eye on you for so very long,” he says.
“Why?” I ask. It is the only thing I can think of to say.
I look to my dad, whose gaze is locked on the monster.
“Tell her,” the monster says.
My dad lets his gaze wander to the floor. “I don’t know where to begin.”
“Dad,” I say, my heart pounding in my chest. “What is this?”
My dad lifts his gaze to meet mine and there is nothing but fear and sorrow in his eyes.
He clutches the book to his chest. “There was a man, a very long time ago. A doctor. We are descended from him. He is the man who inspired the tales of Victor Frankenstein.” The defeat in his voice is clear.
He never wanted me to know about any of this. He was trying to save me from it.
“Dippel,” I say. “The name in the book.”
My dad nods and the monster . . . ?smiles. It is a grotesque and terrible sight. Saliva fills my mouth as I try desperately to stifle the urge to vomit.
“He made you,” I say to the monster, my mind racing.
The monster straightens up and clasps his hands together in front of him; the fingers look like they’ve each come from a different person.
His palms are in such a state of decay I can see the bones and emaciated tendons moving beneath as he opens and closes his hands.
“There was no harnessing of the lightning.” He sighs almost mournfully and his breath is the scent of rot.
“No. Dippel had a power, given to him by right of his birth. The spark came from him. You have that same power. You are what is left of my maker and I am the keeper of his gift to you.”
The monster grabs hold of my wrist and wrenches it up.
I cry out as my shoulder pulls, like it’s going to be ripped away from my body.
Noah sprints toward me but the monster backhands him so hard his feet leave the ground and he flies into the altar, knocking over all the bowls and candles.
He lies motionless. I kick and scream and try beating against the monster with my free hand but it is useless.
He shoves the dead body of the young woman onto the floor and sets me roughly on the raised platform. Camille rushes to the woman’s side and examines her now exposed leg.
“I have spent these many years making sure Dippel’s descendants know their place,” says the monster as he paces in front of me. His steps are uneven, heavy. “Your grandfather was blissfully compliant. Your father, on the other hand, has strayed from his sacred mission.”
“Get away from her!” my mom shouts.
Roger, his skull still dented in, grabs her and as my dad goes to push him away Langan knocks my dad to the ground.
His head strikes the corner of the step that leads up to the altar with a sickening thud.
He sits up, dazed and bleeding. I try to slip off the platform but the monster shoves me hard in the chest, knocking me back. Hot, angry tears sting my eyes.
“And you,” the monster says, turning his attention to my mom. “You were not meant to exist at all.”
My mom narrows her angry gaze at him as she struggles against Roger.
“Come,” the monster says. “Let us see what you are capable of.”
The monster moves toward my father and roughly takes the book from him. He returns to the platform and grabs my arm, squeezing it so hard I think it might break. He pulls me to my feet as Camille wrestles the dead woman’s body back onto the platform.
“I want you to reanimate her,” the monster growls.
“I—I can’t!” I stammer. “I don’t know how!”
The monster leans down and presses his mouth to my ear.
“You have always known. Do it,” he says.
“Or I will kill your father and destroy your mother and this other.” He gestures to Noah’s crumpled frame.
“I will tear down everyone you have ever loved, everyone who has ever known you. You can run but I will follow you to the ends of the world, just as I did my maker. I will sit at your side at the moment of your death.”
“Don’t!” my dad shouts. His voice sounds far away, like he’s still dazed.
Morris kicks him in the back and he winces.
“Stop!” I shout. “Please stop!”
“We will not,” the monster says. “Never.” He leans closer to me, pressing his body against mine.
“Your father would have you believe he is a virtuous man but what has it gained him? Think of your grandfather. He was a paragon of gracious servitude. You could be as Hebe was to Zeus . . . ?cupbearer to a god.” He sets the book on the raised platform and opens it.
“I can’t read it,” I say. “I don’t know how.”
The monster says nothing. He only smiles hideously. “I think you know what you need to do.”
I don’t want to. I shouldn’t. But I can . . . I know it.
The monster suddenly grabs my wrist and wrenches it toward the dead woman’s feet which are now facing me. I grip her ankle, feeling the waxy, cold flesh beneath my palm. I can do this—appease the monster and his creations and maybe save my dad and mom and Noah all at once.
I squeeze her ankle. Her body jolts.
“But the book,” Camille says. “The incantation.”
“Silence,” orders the monster.
Camille lowers her eyes and shuts her mouth.
I grip the dead woman’s other ankle with my free hand. My body feels like it’s on fire. The pain building in my sweaty palms is almost unbearable. The woman’s frame jerks violently under my grip. The monster steps back, his eyes locked only on me, his gaze burning through me.
I look at the open book but I can’t understand the language written there. The dead woman sits up, her chest heaving, her mouth a blackened, open maw. The milky-white orbs beneath her lids roll lazily under her purple-tinged lids.
My hands ache, my head throbs, and I feel . . . ?alive. Strangely, horrifyingly invigorated.
“You feel it as all who have come before you have,” the monster says.
“The power you possess can only be guided by me. I can help you wield it.” He moves behind me and puts his hands on my shoulders.
“I will decide who lives, who dies . . . ?who will become a god, and you will become worthy of your gift.”
I stare into the woman’s terrified face. Is this what my grandfather saw when he reanimated the dead? He wielded this terrible power, too, and he left my father to struggle on his own for the sake of it.
“Kill—kill me,” the woman says, her voice a husk of what it should be. “Kill me.”
I let go of her ankles. She gasps and falls back, tipping off the side of the platform and falling in a heap onto the floor.
“I don’t want to,” I say. “I won’t do it.”
Some nightmarish understanding flickers in the monster’s eyes. “Destroy the mother,” he says. “Kill them all.”
“No!” I try to scramble backward off the platform but the monster grabs my thigh and squeezes it so tight I think it might break.
He holds me in place as Roger and Langan take my mom by her arms. Morris emerges from behind the altar with Noah in his grip.
“Reanimates exist because I will it to be so!” the monster bellows.
“ That is my power. That is my charge. To guide the reanimator to a higher purpose.” The monster stares at me.
“Their purpose—your purpose—is to serve unquestioningly and without hesitation. Dippel cursed me to this life and now I ensure the bearers of his power wield it appropriately.” He tilts his head back and the gaps in the skin of his throat open like many hungry mouths.
“This is my purpose. The reanimator and the reanimated together, in a dance. One and the other. Always.”
“You’re salvaging body parts from dead people,” I say angrily. “You can’t even maintain yourselves. You’re trying to force me to reanimate that woman to do what? Experiment with reanimated flesh? That’s our higher purpose?”
The monster stares at me, through me. “You should be thankful I allow any of you to exist.”
Allow?
I think of all that has happened, about my dad and Grandpa Redwood, my mom, Noah, the other reanimates . . .
“You can’t do any of it without us,” I say as a terrible anger sparks inside me. “You don’t have any real power. You’re some sick, twisted creation, and if the stories are true, your maker thought you were a mistake—an abomination. You are the one who doesn’t deserve to exist.”
The monster’s terrifying gaze flits to me and for a moment I see something distinctly human in his eyes—it is bitter sadness and if I’m not wrong .
. . ?pain. But it is almost immediately overtaken by a kind of anger I’ve never seen before.
I can almost feel it rolling off him in waves. He is seething.
“Reanimators are simply the tool,” the monster says. “But I am the god called forth by their magic. I have spent my existence in the shadows, but no longer. I am Prometheus, but I refuse to be chained. I am the light in the void.”
The other reanimates bow their heads as I look to them for some sense of reason, some sign that any of them are willing to help me.
“The light?” I ask, my voice trembling. “You’re not a light! You said it yourself. The spark that made you came from Dippel.” I face the monster’s lackeys. “You’re not his creations. He’s the same as you! If you are the dark, he is in there with you!”
Something flits across Roger’s face—something that almost looks like regret or sorrow.
I can’t tell. The monster grips my leg harder and I scream.
Noah pulls himself up and staggers forward.
The monster shoves me back and I go skidding across the raised platform and onto the tile floor, slamming into one of the pillars.
My vision goes blurry for a moment and when I regain my focus, Noah is crouched beside me and the monster is stalking toward my mom.
I try to get up but my legs won’t cooperate; I can’t get my feet under me.
The monster grabs hold of my mom and pulls her right arm with a loud grunt. There is a pop as the arm comes away from her torso. The monster flings it to the floor.
“No!” I scream.
My mom’s face is a mask of shock as the monster grasps her by the waist. My dad springs up and strikes the monster in the face over and over but I don’t think he feels it at all.
In one quick motion, the monster violently twists my mom’s torso so that her upper body is facing backward.
He lets her go and she collapses in a heap.
I scramble to my feet, willing my body to work.
Someone catches Noah by the arm but I slip away and manage to grab the only thing within reach, a heavy brass candlestick.
I charge the monster and plunge the end of it into his back.
It sinks into his flesh right below his bottom rib.
He spins around and catches me by the neck.
He squeezes and everything goes black, though I can still hear the terrified screams of my dad and of Noah.
I can’t breathe. I kick against the monster but it’s no use.
The sounds from all around me begin to fade until there is only blackness.